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Dad and I were out and about last weekend, glorious golden winter sunlight, sun low, low, low in the skies now (sunset is now well before 4pm as we move into winter, and the longest night/shortest day is still weeks away). From the top of the Tak Me Doon Road between the Carron Valley and Kilsyth we got these views looking down, the last of the sunlight warming high ground on one side, the other in shadows because of the low sun, the temperature differential creating beautiful, soft, ephemeral mists, but not actually at ground level, hovering a bit higher up, like a blanket of light mist draped over the valley below:

I couldn’t resist this – seen in the last half hour or so of the short daylight, this bare, winter tree silhouetted against the mist, which was turning this beautiful warm copper colour as the sun rapidly declined in the east:

A little earlier we had been round the back of the Campsie Hills and past the Carron Valley reservoir – again the mist rising in the gap between weak winter sunlight on one side and shadows on the other, and again hovering not at ground (or in this case water) level but several feet above it. Utterly gorgeous to take in; while I’m glad some photos came out I’ve got to say they don’t really do justice to how it looked to the naked eye. To say nothing of the feel of it – peaceful, very, very quiet, hardly any other cars passing on the rural road, no town noises, no wind that day, only the sound from some waterfowl, the amber winter sunlight, the long, long shadows and that soft silence, the world screened out by the hills around us:

And one last one, from earlier in the afternoon, from the top of the Crow Road on the Campsie Hills, looking west down into the valley below – all this just a short car ride from the busiest city in Scotland…

Been sorting out and uploading some more shots I took on a long (if somewhat chilly) winter photo-walk around Edinburgh at night recently – with the sun being down not long after four in the afternoon it certainly makes it easier to take dusk and night shots without having to wander round town with camera and tripod late in the evening. This is the Ensign Ewart, a centuries old pub named for the soldier from the Scots Greys who took an Eagle standard from one of the French regiments during the Battle of Waterloo. It is also the highest pub in the city, being right at the top of the Royal Mile, yards from the Castle Esplanade (where Ewart is interred under a large memorial):

From the entrance to the Castle Esplanade, looking down right from the start of the Royal Mile, which runs down from the Castle along the spine of the steep volcanic ridge the Old Town is built upon, to the Palace of Holyrood at the bottom end. You can see the 19th century attraction of the Camera Obscura on the right, still a big draw with tourists today

And there’s the Outlook Tower of the Camera Oscura on Castlehill, quite a prominent landmark:

A view from high up in the Old Town looking down and across the Georgian-era New Town – in the upper centre you can see the green dome of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and in the distance the Firth of Forth, with a moored oil rig near one of the yards on the Fife side of the river (click to see the bigger versions available on Flickr):

The distinctive Ramsay Garden block of very expensive apartments, right by the edge of the Castle Esplanade, high up on the ridge of the Old Town, a mixture of Scots Baronial architecture with some more unusual additions. This is the view from the Esplanade at dusk, the front of the structure is a major landmark on the Old Town’s steep-sided facade as viewed from down below in the New Town:

Down in the Grassmarket, this is the French Connection, a Scottish-French food takeaway – from the looks of the second picture the bloke inside had spotted me lining up my shot!

A little late night art-browsing for this couple on Victoria Street:

Boswell’s Court at the top of the Royal Mile, named for Doctor Boswell who lived there, a 17th century group of structures yards from the Castle, although much modified in the Victorian era. Doctor Boswell’s more famous nephew, James Boswell, biographer of Samuel Johnston, reputedly dined with the grand man of letters here. It is now home to the Witchery, a posh restaurant and supposedly the most haunted dining place in the city.

And some views of Edinburgh Castle from the Esplanade, just a little after the winter sun had set, still a tiny glimmer of light in the western sky behind the Castle – was much darker to the naked eye, but more obvious in a long exposure pulling out as much light as the camera could soak up:

And the Castle gates, now closed for the night, guarded by the stone sculptures of two of Scotland’s greatest historic heroes, Sir William Wallace and Robert the Bruce, King of Scots, instrumental in the Wars of Independence back the late 1200s and early 1300s:

As autumn slips into winter the sun declines into the western sky earlier and earlier each evening now, setting a little after four in the afternoon now. So longer, colder, darker nights come in once more, but it’s not all bad when it gives you sunsets like this in Edinburgh – the sphinxes on the roof of the Royal Scottish Academy watching the sky becoming an Impressionist painting for just a few, brief moments, sun already gone but a last splash of colours across the western sky before the final fall of night:

A lot of people paused to watch as Edinburgh Castle was silhouetted by the dying of the light:

Despite the cold I went for a photo walk, and ended up spending over two hours taking night shots. Most still to be processed, but here are a few I took around Victoria Terrace:

The terrace is in the Old Town and overlooks Victoria Street, which curves down steeply from George IV Bridge down to the Grassmarket. There are several bars and restaurants at one end of the terrace – if you go into the front of those establishments from the Royal Mile or Johnston Terrace (behind the Castle) you seem to be going in at ground level, but because the Old Town is built on a steeply sloped volcanic ridge, when you come out their back door to the terrace you find yourself looking down over several more levels below. It’s a good place to see the different levels Edinburgh’s geology forced the architecture to take.

A lot of people don’t even notice the terrace above Victoria Street when they visit, quite easy to miss, but if you are in town it’s well worth a quick wander along, night or day, because it offers some unusual perspectives on the Old Town and views across the heart of the town, such as towards 17th century Heriot’s School, which here looks like the Edinburgh branch of Hogwart’s:

And now it is dark before I leave work each day I get views like this walking up the Royal Mile:

I regularly look through the archives on my Flickr photostream, and if I see any pics I shot on this day in previous years I will pick out a few and post them on Twitter. This one cropped up recently, taken in 2011. I was actually in the Dovecot Studios for Doors Open Day to take some photos and explore a bit – it’s an old public swimming pool, long closed and then converted into a great studio space for textile artists. Being an old pool it has a large glass roof which lets lots of natural light into the space where the swimming pool would once have been, which is obviously great for the artists. The upper walkway above what would have been the pool has been retained, and as I was taking some photos of the studio I noticed these two ladies at the other end of the walkway, and the way the natural light and shadows were around them was just begging for a monochrome shot, and as I had the camera out I zoomed in and took a quick pic.

I had almost forgotten I had taken this one until it came up when checking the Flickr archives, still quite pleased with it considering it was a quick shot taken on the spur of the moment just because the positions, light and shadow all seemed just right.

Made a new friend while walking down Middle Meadow Walk. Extremely busy at rush hour with folks walking home from work and legions of students from the nearby university, and here is this handsome wee chap darting around among the trees just a few feet from hundreds of people, most walking past without even noticing he was there. I love that little things like this can happen even just walking home from work in a bustling city:

It’s Edinburgh, it’s August and that means festival time – the city is bursting at the seams with the Edinburgh International Festival The Art Festival, The Edinburgh International Book Festival and, of course, the world’s largest arts festival, the Fringe.

And that means me taking a lot of photos, mostly on the Royal Mile, where the performers traditionally congregate to try to build an audience – with hundreds of shows you really have to fight for bums on seats at the Fringe, and a lot of shows often don’t get many while others sell out, so being noticed is all important, with many out in costumes and make-up, others perform small snippets from their shows on the wee stages set up along the Mile, and it’s just packed pretty much wall to wall on the section of the Mile along by the Cathedral. Happy hunting ground for taking pics, first year I have been using the new camera, which is still a bridge camera but with manual zoom and manual focus, which has been a real boon, much quicker and easier than relying on auto-focus, especially in a busy, chaotic street environment with lots of movement of folks.

As always click the pics to see the larger sized versions over on my Flickr photo stream.

That manual zoom and focus is proving damned handy for taking quick shots of moving performers, and the larger zoom means I can get in a bit closer for capturing this kind of shot:

Sometimes masks must be used to protect the innocent…

Plenty of singing on the Fringe too:

Not to mention dance:

And some enchanting smiles

Watched over by the Fringe Police! You picked the wrong festival to haul ass through, boy!

During the Edinburgh International Film Festival last week I saw a film called Cinema, Mon Amour, a documentary about a group trying to save an old cinema in Romania. Afterwards the Filmhouse very kindly gave us a short tour of the main projection booth – we had to be quiet and I couldn’t use the flash as another festival screening was going on below us (we could see it through the wee rectangular window in the booth). The pair of decades old cine projectors are named Kenneth and Sid – even in this bastion of arthouse and international film, the Carry On movies have influence!

Quite nostalgic for me to see these and hear them – the whirring sound of anaologue projectors is part of my childhood memories of cinema, and at home we had a Super 8mm cine camera as well as our 35mm still cameras, and we screened them quite often on long winter’s nights for the family. There’s something satisfying about old analogue tech like this, you can see it moving, see how it works. The Filmhouse must be one of the last cinemas in the city that retains the ability to show actual film prints as well as digital and properly trained projectionists. They were telling us about their skills, from being able to change from one projector to the other seamlessly mid-film, fixing broken celluloid to adjusting focus, ratio and even speed for different formats and eras (early films shot on hand-cranked cameras require a lot of skill to adjust the film speed, since their shooting rate varied as cameramen’s arms got tired. Lovely to see these magic lanterns which paint stories on a screen using nothing more than light…

I’m enjoying a few days off for my annual Edinburgh International Film Festival fun. Last night at the Traverse Theatre as part of the film fest they had an “in conversation” with French actor Dominique Pinon, who has appeared in a number of my favourite films over the years. One of those evening that reminds me one of the reason I love living here so much is that with our festivals everyone comes to Edinburgh at some point, writers, directors, actors, musicians, they all come here. I took a few photos with the new camera – sitting several rows up and back in a theatre so not the best place for taking photos, but out of the batch I shot a handful came out passably.

Walking around the annual Meadows Festival recently, beautifully bright, summer day, and I could hear old music drifting over the air. It was coming from this very handsome old HMV gramophone on a stall selling antiques:

Rather lovely thing to see and hear, especially in the park on a warm afternoon in the sun…

Gorgeous late spring blossoms near my home, hanging heavy on the bough:

The pavement nearby is now carpeted in a fine layer of fallen petals, for a few days of the years only. I couldn’t resist raising my hand to the branches and running my fingers along through the petals; it was like touching softest silk…